Could a film adaptation work?
>The demon sends Soren to the Library of Babel, a gargantuan library bisected by an enormous chasm. The library contains every book that can possibly be written on 410 pages, with 40 lines of 80 characters on each page each being one of the 95 regular characters on a standard keyboard. Soren realizes that he has been restored to peak physical health and endowed with a photographic memory of his life on Earth and his stay in hell. Magical kiosks located periodically along the library create any food or drink the inhabitants request. A sign informs Soren of the rules of Hell: he will be brought back to life if he dies; he is freed from earthly covenants such as marriage; and he is allowed to leave Hell if he finds a book that exactly retells his earthly life story, with no spelling or grammatical errors.Big deal. How hard can it be?
>>223633120410 pages seems a bit short for an exact full retelling of someone's entire life
>>223632984I really enjoyed this, tragic elements and all. It's a pretty good shot at the horror of true eternity and immortality.
>>223632984Yeah and it would be relatively easy to film due to the nature of the setting. Hollywood would fuck it up and include a first act setup of Soren finding out he has cancer, or tell his entire story in a flashback, completely missing the point of the horror
>>223633162That's the horrific part. >Your life story will be in multiple books>There must be no spelling or grammatical errors>You're incredibly unlikely to find anything close but when you do it's likely to have huge errorsHe's there for 100 years before he finds someone that finds something with a basic English sentence in it. I think by the end of the book he's been in the library longer than the universe has been active, and he's been falling down the chasm in the middle of the library for most of it, just trying to reach the bottom
>>223633240>Your life story will be in multiple booksThis is wrong, it's specifically one book.
>>223633240>Your life story will be in multiple booksBut the rules just said one book there not multiple
He literally spent a billion years killing himself every day on his way to the bottom of the library.
>>223632984I really loved this story, a shame there isn't really anything else like it.
>>223633240he basically experiences the length of the big bang to the heat death of the universe multiple times
>>223632984Honestly it should be a series that goes through a bunch of people's different personal hells.
I refuse to believe that this many retards on /tv/ actually read.
>>223633368I listened to the audiobook
>>223633384Me too
>>223633120>>223632984>>223633240this book sounds very reddity
Concept and vibe remind me a lot of picrel
>>223633319There's a book called the Divine Farce which kind of has the same vibe but asks the question "if this isn't hell, then how much worse is actual hell?", it touches on the same prospect of unfathomable time and strange settings
>>223633120There are 1.96 × 10219658 books and they all have the same cover/spine and you need to read each one at least partially to see if it's your book. There's estimated to be 1080 atoms in our observable universe. The number of books is incomprehensible
>>223633565Damn 4chan doesn't format correctly. Anyways look up the numbers it's horrifying.
>>223632984So let me get this straight, a guy with no understanding of Zoroastrianism or theology in general wrote a book where it is the one true religion, and did it while copying Borges' Libraby of Babel?
>>223633319>there isn't really anything else like it.I've never read the book itself, but reading this thread about it reminds of The Jaunt, which isn't a full novel but is a short story that touches on the same concept of a maddening eternity.
>>223633506>no audiobook
>>223633202>initial shot of him in the library>pulls out a book full of gibberish, sighs and tosses it aside, pulling another out>show then cuts back to his previous life and stays there for the entire season filling it with gay relationship drama and nothing actually relevant to the story whatsoever
>>223633670we live in a post-postmodernist era. Now you don't even reference a past work, you just copy it outright since the new audience simply doesn't care about old stuff.